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IS ACADEMIC FREEDOM THREATENED BY CHINA’S

INFLUENCE ON U.S. UNIVERSITIES?

HEARING

BEFORE THE

SUBCOMMITTEE ON AFRICA, GLOBAL HEALTH, 

GLOBAL HUMAN RIGHTS, AND 

INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS

OF THE

COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

ONE HUNDRED THIRTEENTH CONGRESS

SECOND SESSION

DECEMBER 4, 2014

Serial No. 113–230

Printed for the use of the Committee on Foreign Affairs

(

Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.foreignaffairs.house.gov/ or

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/

(II)

COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS 

EDWARD R. ROYCE, California, Chairman 

CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, New Jersey 

ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida 

DANA ROHRABACHER, California 

STEVE CHABOT, Ohio 

JOE WILSON, South Carolina 

MICHAEL T. MCCAUL, Texas 

TED POE, Texas 

MATT SALMON, Arizona 

TOM MARINO, Pennsylvania 

JEFF DUNCAN, South Carolina 

ADAM KINZINGER, Illinois 

MO BROOKS, Alabama 

TOM COTTON, Arkansas 

PAUL COOK, California 

GEORGE HOLDING, North Carolina 

RANDY K. WEBER SR., Texas 

SCOTT PERRY, Pennsylvania 

STEVE STOCKMAN, Texas 

RON DESANTIS, Florida 

DOUG COLLINS, Georgia 

MARK MEADOWS, North Carolina 

TED S. YOHO, Florida 

SEAN DUFFY, Wisconsin 

CURT CLAWSON, Florida 

ELIOT L. ENGEL, New York 

ENI F.H. FALEOMAVAEGA, American 

Samoa 

BRAD SHERMAN, California 

GREGORY W. MEEKS, New York 

ALBIO SIRES, New Jersey 

GERALD E. CONNOLLY, Virginia 

THEODORE E. DEUTCH, Florida 

BRIAN HIGGINS, New York 

KAREN BASS, California 

WILLIAM KEATING, Massachusetts 

DAVID CICILLINE, Rhode Island 

ALAN GRAYSON, Florida 

JUAN VARGAS, California 

BRADLEY S. SCHNEIDER, Illinois 

JOSEPH P. KENNEDY III, Massachusetts 

AMI BERA, California 

ALAN S. LOWENTHAL, California 

GRACE MENG, New York 

LOIS FRANKEL, Florida 

TULSI GABBARD, Hawaii 

JOAQUIN CASTRO, Texas

AMY PORTER, Chief of Staff THOMAS SHEEHY, Staff Director

JASON STEINBAUM, Democratic Staff Director 

SUBCOMMITTEE ON AFRICA, GLOBAL HEALTH, GLOBAL HUMAN RIGHTS, AND

INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS

CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, New Jersey, Chairman 

TOM MARINO, Pennsylvania 

RANDY K. WEBER SR., Texas 

STEVE STOCKMAN, Texas 

MARK MEADOWS, North Carolina 

KAREN BASS, California 

DAVID CICILLINE, Rhode Island 

AMI BERA, California 

(III)

C O N T E N T S 

Page

WITNESSES 

Perry Link, Ph.D., chancellorial chair for innovative teaching, University 

of California, Riverside ........................................................................................ 6

Thomas Cushman, Ph.D., Deffenbaugh de Hoyos Carlson chair in the social 

sciences, Wellesley College .................................................................................. 15

Xia Yeliang, Ph.D., visiting fellow, Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, 

Cato Institute ....................................................................................................... 32

Sophie Richardson, Ph.D., China director, Human Rights Watch ...................... 40

LETTERS, STATEMENTS, ETC., SUBMITTED FOR THE HEARING 

Perry Link, Ph.D.: Prepared statement ................................................................. 9

Thomas Cushman, Ph.D.: Prepared statement ..................................................... 18

Xia Yeliang, Ph.D.: Prepared statement ................................................................ 35

APPENDIX 

Hearing notice .......................................................................................................... 56

Hearing minutes ...................................................................................................... 57

The Honorable Christopher H. Smith, a Representative in Congress from 

the State of New Jersey, and chairman, Subcommittee on Africa, Global 

Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations: Letter 

from members of the faculty of New York University ...................................... 58

(1)

IS ACADEMIC FREEDOM THREATENED BY 

CHINA’S INFLUENCE ON U.S. UNIVERSITIES? 

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2014

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,

SUBCOMMITTEE ON AFRICA, GLOBAL HEALTH, GLOBAL HUMAN RIGHTS, AND INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS,

COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS,

Washington, DC. 

The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 1:05 p.m., in room 

2172, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Christopher H. Smith 

(chairman of the subcommittee) presiding. 

Mr. SMITH. The subcommittee will come to order and good afternoon to everybody. 

I welcome you here today. This hearing is the first in a series 

of hearings probing the question whether China’s soft power educational initiatives are undermining academic freedom at U.S. 

schools and universities. 

We see it manifested primarily in two ways. The first is in the 

building of satellite campuses in China or American universities 

where Chinese rules of engagement are said to hold sway, in other 

words, places where no criticism of the Chinese Government or promotions of democracy and freedom are allowed. 

Second, we see it in the myriad outposts of Chinese soft power 

that have opened on campuses throughout the United States and 

the world, the so-called Confucius Institutes whose curricula integrates Chinese Government policy on contentious issues such as 

Tibet and Taiwan and whose hiring practices explicitly exclude 

Falun Gong practitioners. It should be noted that we are seeing 

emerging faculty opposition to these institutes as well as to the all 

too cozy and lucrative arrangements which American universities 

have with institutions affiliated with the Chinese Government. 

This prompts us to ask the question: Is American education for 

sale? And, if so, are U.S. colleges and universities undermining the 

principle of academic freedom and, in the process, their own credibility in exchange for China’s education dollars? 

You know, a number of years ago, the author James Mann wrote 

a book called ‘‘The China Fantasy’’ where he recounts how, in the 

1990s, some American business leaders and government officials 

put forward the fantasy that free trade with China would be the 

catalyst for political liberalism. 

I have been to China many times. I was in China almost immediately after the Tiananmen Square massacre. At one of the meetings in the early 1990s with American businessmen and, despite 

2

the ongoing jailing and executions of dissidents, these businessmen 

in China told me that if we just trade a little more, the dictatorship 

will somehow matriculate into a democracy. As we all know now, 

China has failed to democratize, despite increases in the standard 

of living by many, but certainly not all of its citizens. 

Political repression is an all too common occurrence. I have 

chaired now to date almost 50 Congressional hearings on Chinese 

human rights abuses. It is not getting better. It is getting demonstrably worse, especially under Xi Jinping. Yet U.S. policy toward 

China continues to overlook abuses of fundamental human rights 

for the sake of business opportunities and economic interests. 

But what about U.S. universities who often tout their adherence 

to higher ideals and equate their nonprofit status as a badge of 

good citizenship, which puts them above reproach. Perhaps they, 

too, are engaged in their own version of ‘‘The China Fantasy,’’ willing to accept limitations in the very principles and freedoms that 

are the foundation of the U.S. system of higher education, justifying quiet compromises that they would never entertain at home 

by telling themselves that they are helping to bring about change 

in China. 

As Dr. Perry Link brilliantly argues, these compromises often 

take the form of self-censorship about what universities and faculty 

teach, who they invite to speak, what fellows they accept in residence. So long as the dragon is not provoked, they think they will 

be allowed to continue doing their work, slowly changing China 

from the inside. But are these American universities changing 

China or is China changing these American universities? 

What is the reason that New York University, for example, terminated the fellowship of a world-class human rights advocate and 

hero, Chen Guangcheng? NYU was one of those prestigious universities for which China built a campus, a satellite of the University 

of Shanghai. Though the Chinese Government laid out the funds—

and it was a huge amount of money—the transaction involved a 

moral cost. As certain members of the NYU faculty wrote in a letter to the university board of trustees, the circumstances surrounding the launch of an NYU satellite campus in Shanghai and 

the ending of Mr. Chen’s residence created what they called ‘‘a public perception, accurate or otherwise, that NYU made commitments 

in order to operate in China.’’

I would like, without any objection, to include in the record the 

letter from the NYU faculty. And without objection, it is so ordered. 

I want to note very clearly that we have repeatedly invited 

NYU’s president and key faculty to testify before this subcommittee. And so far, without any success, on five separate occasions, we gave NYU 15 different dates to appear here, to answer 

serious questions about their relationship with China and, so far, 

they have begged off on each and every one of them. 

This is the first of a series of hearings. I can tell you, we will 

re-invite NYU and other institutions of higher learning to give an 

account, to tell us exactly what are those terms and conditions and 

whether or not they are being muzzled and stifled when it comes 

to human rights and democracy and other basic freedoms. And I 

do hope they will come. 

3

On a personal note, I spent considerable time with Chen 

Guangcheng when he first came to the United States, having 

worked on his case since 2004, which included four congressional 

hearings exclusively dedicated to his freedom. At two of those hearings, he phoned in from the hospital where he was after he was 

kicked out of the U.S. Embassy. And at the last one, he said, I 

want to come to the United States. The next day, the Chinese Government granted him that request. 

However, it is my impression that the NYU officials and others 

sought to isolate him from supporters viewed as too conservative 

or those they considered Chinese dissidents. We may never know 

if NYU experienced what Chen himself termed as persistent—and 

these are his words—‘‘persistent and direct pressure from China to 

oust him’’ or if it was simply an act of prudent self-censorship to 

keep in Beijing’s good graces. I don’t know the answer. But it is 

my conviction that self-censorship and the chilling effect that this 

has had is even more pernicious a threat to fundamental freedoms 

and to the principle of academic freedom. 

One of our witnesses, again, Dr. Perry Link, has made this case 

repeatedly over the years drawing on his own personal experiences. 

And I thank him and all of our very distinguished witnesses for 

being here today. 

I would note for the record we are not here to relitigate the sad 

divorce of Chen Guangcheng and NYU. It is a disheartening part 

of a larger issue, however, whether American universities will compromise academic freedom again to get a piece of the lucrative Chinese education market. 

Today’s hearing, then, will mark the beginning of a long hard 

look of costs and benefits of the growing number of Chinese educational partnerships started by U.S. universities and colleges, including exchange programs and satellite campuses in China and 

Confucius institutes in the United States and around the world. 

While foreign educational partnerships are important endeavors—I was an exchange student, it was a great experience, no one 

is questioning that—this is a whole different focus. I think we can 

all agree that U.S. colleges and universities should not be 

outsourcing academic control, faculty and student oversight, or curriculum to a foreign government, in this case, a dictatorship. Unfortunately, there is now some evidence emerging giving rise to this 

hearing. 

The American Association of University Professors or AAUP, 

along with its sister organization in Canada, published a report in 

July blasting the Confucius Institute model as a partnership that 

‘‘sacrificed the integrity of the [host university] and its academic 

staff’’ by requiring ‘‘unacceptable concessions’’ that allow ‘‘the Confucius Institutes to advance a state agenda in the recruitment and 

control of academic staff, in the choice of curriculum, and in the restriction of debate.’’ That is fully their quote. 

The AAUP concluded by saying that—and I quote it again—

‘‘Confucius Institutes function as an arm of the Chinese state and 

are allowed to ignore academic freedom’’ and recommended shutting down U.S. Confucius Institutes unless they could meet certain 

standards of academic freedom and transparency. 

4

The Confucius Institutes are China’s soft power push, an attempt 

to increase the number of young people studying and ideally, from 

their point of view, coming to admire, and ours, Chinese culture 

and language. This is not harmful in itself for the Chinese culture 

and language, as distinct from its political culture, is indeed admirable. 

But while some U.S. university administrators say the influence 

of Confucius Institutes is benign, University of Chicago’s professor 

Marshall Sahlins has called the Confucius Institutes ‘‘academic 

malware,’’ inimical to the U.S. model of academic freedom. 

What we should do is welcome U.S.-China educational partnerships that promote cultural understanding and critical language 

skills and protect academic freedom, that allow the teaching of sensitive topics and not subject to any of same rules that govern Chinese academic institutions where professors are fired or jailed for 

exercising the universal right to free speech. 

Indeed, there is a U.S. national security interest in having U.S. 

students learn Chinese, but such language skills should be taught 

on our terms, without the baggage brought by the Confucius Institute ties. And if those freedoms are violated or compromised, we 

need to find some recourse, whether through withholding Department of Education funds or State Department exchange program 

funds from schools that willingly compromise the principles of academic freedom and human rights to gain, again, a small share of 

the Chinese educational market. 

That is why I am announcing today that I will be asking the 

General Accountability Office (GAO) to study and review the agreements of both satellite campuses in China and of Confucius Institutes in the United States. I would also like to know if those agreements are public, whether they compromise academic or other freedoms of faculty, students, and workers, and whether Chinese 

teachers are allowed the freedom to worship as they please and to 

teach about Tiananmen Square, including the massacre, Tibet, or 

Taiwan. 

I will also ask the GAO to study whether U.S. satellite campuses 

in China operate differently from Chinese universities and whether 

there is a two-tier system in place where Chinese students and faculty have more restrictions placed on their activities and research 

than U.S. students and faculties. 

I will also ask whether the Communist Party committees operate 

on campus, whether fundamental freedoms are protected for both 

Chinese and U.S. students and faculty, again, religious freedom, 

Internet freedom, freedom of speech, association, and whether universities are required to enforce China’s draconian population control policies, particularly on the young women who may be attending those facilities and those institutions. 

These are important questions, and there are more. We need to 

look at whether these issues can be handled by the universities, 

their faculties and trustees themselves, or if there is something the 

U.S. Congress and the President must do to ensure that academic 

freedom is protected. U.S. universities and colleges should reflect 

and protect the highest principles of freedom and transparency. 

They should be islands—islands of freedom where foreign students 

5

and faculty can enjoy the fundamental freedoms denied them in 

their own country. 

And, again, I want thank our witnesses. And before I introduce 

to them, yield to my good friend and colleague Mark Meadows for 

any opening comment. 

Mr. MEADOWS. Well, I just thank the chairman for your leadership on this particular issue. 

Thank each one of you as witnesses. Certainly, we want to hear 

from you. There are others that are monitoring this, but I would 

close with this, human rights—the basic human rights that all of 

us should enjoy are areas that have really been a hallmark within 

a lot of our universities in terms of being the beacon of making 

sure that those voices are heard. And yet here we see, tragically, 

the reverse potentially being done. 

And so as—you heard the passion in the chairman’s voice. I can 

tell you that, whether it is before a camera or whether it is in the 

privacy of his office where there are just two of us, that passion is 

consistent and is unyielding. 

And so with that, I would yield back, Mr. Chairman. 

Mr. SMITH. Thank you very much here, Mr. Meadows. 

I would like to now introduce our very distinguished panel, all 

who have impeccable records but, also, have been true game changers when it comes to human rights. 

And I would like to begin first with Dr. Perry Link, who is professor emeritus of east Asian studies at Princeton and 

Chancellorial chair for teaching across disciplines at the University 

of California at Riverside. He has published widely on modern Chinese language, literature, and popular thought and is a member of 

the Princeton China Initiative, Human Rights Watch/Asia, and 

other groups that support fundamental human rights. He has authored numerous books, and he co-edited with Andrew Nathan 

‘‘The Tiananmen Papers, The Chinese Leadership’s Decision to Use 

Force Against Their Own People.’’ Since 1996, he has been 

blacklisted and denied visas by the Chinese Communist Government. 

We will then hear from Dr. Thomas Cushman, who is professor 

in the social studies and professor of sociology the Wellesley College. His academic work has focused on the comparative study of 

Communist societies with a special emphasis on Communist Party 

control of civil society and dissidence. He has taught and written 

extensively on the use of propaganda by authoritarian governments 

to shape public opinion in liberal democratic societies. He has written and edited numerous books, is a founder and former editor-inchief of the Journal of Human Rights, and is a prominent activist 

in the global freedom movement in supporting dissidents in contemporary authoritarian societies. 

We will then hear from Dr. Xia Yeliang, who is a visiting professor at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity. Dr. Xia’s work focuses on the institutional and policy reforms China needs to become modern, a free society. Prior to joining Cato, Dr. Xia was a professor in the department of economics 

at Peking University where he taught since 2000. He was dismissed by Peking University in October 2013 because of his outspoken criticism of China’s Communist Party and his advocacy of 

6

democracy and basic human rights. Dr. Xia was among the original 

signers of Charter 08, a 2008 manifesto calling for basic freedoms, 

constitutional democracy, and respect for human rights, and was a 

founder of the Cathay Institute of Public Affairs, a market-liberal 

think-tank in China. 

We will then hear from Dr. Sophie Richardson, who is no stranger to this subcommittee, who is China director at Human Rights 

Watch. Dr. Richardson is the author of numerous articles on domestic Chinese political reform and democratization and human 

rights in many Asian countries. She has testified before the European Parliament, the U.S. Congress, this subcommittee many 

times, as well as others, and has provided commentary to many 

prominent news outlets. Dr. Richardson is the author of ‘‘China, 

Cambodia, and the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence,’’ an indepth examination of China’s foreign policy since 1954’s Geneva 

Conference, including rare interviews with policymakers. 

Just an extraordinary panel. And, Dr. Perry Link, I would like 

to yield to you such time as you may consume. 

STATEMENT OF PERRY LINK, PH.D., CHANCELLORIAL CHAIR 

FOR INNOVATIVE TEACHING, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, 

RIVERSIDE 

Mr. LINK. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and Congressman Meadows, for inviting me to this important hearing. 

In academic exchange with China, our country has two very different kinds of interlocutors on the other side. These are, number 

one, the officials of the Communist Party of China and, two, Chinese scholars themselves. And it is crucial to distinguish these two 

different players. Most of the mistakes of U.S. academic administrators come from a failure to distinguish them. The two groups 

have different goals. The main goal of the Chinese scholars, like 

scholars everywhere, is to advance knowledge. 

The main goals of the Communist Party are three: First, to gain 

technological knowledge that will be useful in increasing the power 

of the Chinese state. Second, to spread abroad a rosy version of 

Chinese history that is incomplete and, in important respects, 

false. And, third, to intimidate and to punish scholars, both Chinese and Western, who do not cooperate. 

It is crucially important to recognize the nonscholarly goals of 

the Communist Party of China and, hence, to be careful in scholarly exchange. But it would also be a serious mistake to turn away 

from China’s genuine scholars who have come under increasingly 

severe pressure in recent months. The Chinese Government has 

issued orders nationwide that scholars must support the Communist Party and reject so-called universal values. Chinese scholars who disobey are subject to harassment, firings, and even imprisonment. 

The political persecution of scholars in China today is worse than 

it has been since the 1970s under Mao Zedong. This persecution is 

part of a larger pattern of aggressive behavior by the Chinese state 

on many fronts. One of the many costs of the troubles in the Middle East is that it is distracting attention from the serious trouble 

that is brewing today in China. 

7

Inside China, for decades, the main tool by which the Communist 

Party has controlled expression has been to use fear to induce selfcensorship. ‘‘Don’t say what we do not want to hear or you will 

bear the consequences.’’ Now, with China’s new wealth and rise on 

the world stage, the Chinese Communist Party has sought to apply 

these same tools in other countries, including ours. The effects are 

visible in business and diplomacy, but here I will restrict my comments to academics. 

Western scholars, like myself, are made to understand that if 

they cross red lines in their public expression, if they mention topics such as Tibetan or Uyghur autonomy, Taiwan independence, 

the Falun Gong, the Tiananmen massacre, Chinese imprisoning 

the Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo, the spectacular wealth of the 

superelite families of Xi Jinping, Li Peng, Wen Jiabao and others, 

then, they will have trouble. Their access to field work, archives, 

and interviews might be blocked and they can be blacklisted from 

entering the country entirely. 

At any given time, there are only a dozen or two American scholars on visa blacklists but the effect of the blacklists extends much, 

much farther because virtually every scholar knows about the 

blacklists and has an incentive to stay clear of the red lines. This 

pressure affects the way American scholars use language, and here 

there are major costs to the American public. Because, for example, 

Beijing forbids mention of Taiwan independence, scholars speak of 

‘‘the Taiwan question’’ or ‘‘cross-strait issues.’’ Similarly, the 

Tiananmen massacre becomes only ‘‘an incident.’’ Graduate students are counseled not to write dissertations about Chinese democracy for fear that blacklisting might ruin their young careers. 

Seasoned scholars are afraid to go on the PBS News Hour to comment on politically sensitive topics. 

In addition to fear as a way to induce self-censorship, in recent 

times, the Chinese Government has used positive inducements to 

similar effect. It has funded an archipelago of Confucius Institutes 

to teach Chinese language and culture in colleges and high schools 

around the world, including more than 70 in our country. American 

recipients of these funds know, without having to be told, that they 

must not invite the Dalai Lama, hold seminars on Liu Xiaobo, or 

cross other Communist Party red lines. A wordless self-censorship 

reigns. And students see only a blanched cameo of what China is 

today. 

Now, I am trying to stay under 5 minutes, so I am going to name 

my three policy recommendations in brief. But you can read more 

about them in my written statements. 

Mr. SMITH. Again, if——

Mr. LINK. Pardon? 

Mr. SMITH [continuing]. Any of you exceed the 5, we are more 

than happy to receive it orally as well. So don’t limit yourself too 

much, okay. 

Mr. LINK. My first policy recommendation is that the U.S. Government should fund Chinese language programs in the U.S. Our 

chairman himself mentioned this a moment ago. Why should we—

and by ‘‘we’’ I mean school administrators across the country—

hand our young people over to an authoritarian government beVerDate 0ct 09 2002 14:01 Jan 09, 2015 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00011 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 Z:\WORK\_AGH\120414\91663 SHIRL
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cause they supply the funds? We have enough funds for that. Certainly, this should be a vital national interest. 

My second recommendation is that American university administrators, in their programs with China, should adopt a policy of consciously staking out the broadest of fields. What I mean by that is 

that, when a satellite campus is set up in Shanghai or somewhere 

or a Confucius Institute here, the policy ought to be to make it 

clear in a low-key but dignified way that we will talk about Liu 

Xiaobo, we will talk about the Tiananmen massacre, we will have 

seminars with the Dalai Lama, if we can get him to come, not for 

the purpose of sticking our fingers in the dragon’s eye, but in order 

to stake out the borderline. Because if you don’t stake out the borderline, natural self-censorship will kick in and the field with 

shrink, shrink, shrink, shrink, shrink, until you are saying nothing 

except that blanched cameo. 

The third recommendation I have is that the U.S. Government 

should withhold visas for Confucius Institute instructors at high 

profile U.S. institutions until the practice of withholding visas for 

American scholars on political grounds is ended. 

And I will stop there. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Mr. SMITH. Thank you so very much, Dr. Link. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Link follows:]

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Mr. SMITH. We now go to Dr. Cushman. 

STATEMENT OF THOMAS CUSHMAN, PH.D., DEFFENBAUGH DE 

HOYOS CARLSON CHAIR IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES, WELLESLEY COLLEGE 

Mr. CUSHMAN. I would like to thank the committee, and Mr. 

Chairman and Mr. Meadows, for inviting me to provide testimony 

today. 

My comments are a very brief overview of a more detailed written testimony submitted for the record. 

We have already talked about Confucius Institutes, satellite campuses. My concern has been with the more small-scale partnerships 

being forged out between the United States and Chinese institutions involving exchanges of students and faculty in special events 

around common themes. We have much less data on the nature 

and structure of these relationships, but I feel like they are one of 

the more important emerging structural relationships between U.S. 

and Chinese institutions. 

Just last week, Chinese President Xi Jinping noted that the Chinese foreign policy should be designed to ‘‘increase China’s soft 

power, give a good Chinese narrative, and better communicate China’s message to the world.’’ It should be stressed at the outset that 

partnerships between U.S. and Chinese academic institutions will 

be a major means for promoting this Chinese foreign policy objective. 

I would also like to raise the question, perhaps rhetorically, of 

what does it mean for U.S. institutions to enter into a literal partnership with the Chinese Communist Party. On the U.S. side, institutions of higher education are a main mechanism of the 100,000 

strong initiative put forth by the Obama administration in 2009. 

China is a rich source of revenue from the estimated 274,000 

Chinese students studying in the U.S. The vast majority of whom 

paid full tuition and costs. Students from the PRC contribute an 

estimated $27 billion per annum to the American economy. Most 

of the attention to date in a scholarly way has been focused on 

Confucius Institutes. As I said, my concern is with the more general partnerships that we really have very little data on, but that 

I am starting to collect. 

Based on my own experiences and research, I would like to raise 

some concerns about these new partnerships in answer to the central question of the hearing, is academic freedom threatened by 

Chinese influence in universities? And many of my observations 

mirror those of Professor Link and, I am sure, others on the panel 

and elsewhere. 

Number one, formal exchanges and partnerships provide platforms for official positions of the CCP to be aired on U.S. campuses 

and at formal events in China. At many academic events, whether 

in China or the U.S., one can expect the presence of representatives of the CCP, who monitor events, engage in surveillance of 

Chinese participants and, when possible, use such events for official propaganda purposes. 

Two—and this has been covered already—but institutions and 

programs in the U.S. may decide not to cover certain topics during 

official events because of concern for offending or being rude to 

16

their Chinese counterparts or because of direct pressure from the 

Chinese side. 

Three, scholars of China may self-censor and avoid public criticism of aspects of China for fear of losing access to China. And this 

has been already gone over, so I won’t mention it again. 

Fourth, the partnerships are asymmetrical. U.S. scholars are 

subject to close scrutiny for their work and face potential bans from 

China, whereas Chinese scholars are free from such constraints 

and can, theoretically, discuss the problems of American society 

with impunity. And given that the cultural climate in American 

universities, you might actually add that Chinese scholars who 

come and criticize the United States would be welcomed, as opposed to U.S. scholars going to criticize aspects of Chinese society. 

Fifth, for many U.S. faculty members of Chinese origin, exchanges between U.S. institutions—between their institutions in 

the U.S. and their home country represent intercultural opportunities that could not be dreamed of just a short time ago. Chinese 

faculty members in the United States are building important 

bridges between the U.S. and China that are necessary, but some 

might be less hesitant to criticize China in order to protect these 

new opportunities, to protect their own access to China, and especially, from what I have been able to determine, to protect family 

members who remain there. 

Sixth, professors who are increasing subject to student evaluations for promotion, tenure, and salary increases, especially at the 

junior levels, may avoid discussing sensitive topics about China in 

their classes out of fear of negative evaluations by Chinese students who are understandably defensive and patriotic about China. 

Seven, professors who are publically critical of particular practices in China, especially those of the CCP, run the risk of being 

labeled as anti-China or anti-Chinese. This deliberate propaganda 

tactic of equating criticism of the policies of the CCP with criticisms of persons of Chinese or more general Asian descent is especially effective in the current climate of identity politics that predominates on American campuses. 

The fundamental duty of all U.S. universities is the protection of 

academic freedom as the inalienable moral foundation of the modern university. In order to protect infringements on academic freedom that might ensue from partnerships with Chinese institutions, 

professors must take a leading role in, first, fostering debates on 

controversial issues that are avoided on campuses, especially in resistance to people who might try to stop them. 

Two, exposing deliberate CCP propaganda efforts associated with 

events carried out in the U.S. under the aegis of partnerships. This 

task can be enhanced by drawing on the considerable experience 

and expertise of Chinese dissidents and human rights activists and 

inviting them to campuses at every available opportunity, again, 

with the coda that there might be resistance to such things. 

Third, providing Chinese students with the tools for critical 

thinking that are the core of the liberal arts, while at the same 

time understanding and respecting their views and experiences as 

students who are educated in an environment where independent 

and critical thinking are highly circumscribed. 

17

Fourth, developing courses that deliberately examine controversial topics that are avoided in China and which other faculty in the 

U.S. environment might not teach in order to avoid giving offense, 

again, with the coda that there might be resistance to such things. 

In my full written report to the subcommittee, I have made several policy recommendations for your consideration, one of which I 

will mention—that I think that one thing we don’t know and that, 

I think, that political authorities might be concerned in finding 

out—is among institutions who receive Federal funding for their 

programs in no matter what form, there should be some kind of 

audit or kind of inventory of exactly how many American universities have what kind of partnerships with China, what is discussed at these partnerships. This is an extremely important thing. 

We just simply don’t know how many there are. 

And I also suggest that colleges themselves and universities who 

receive Federal funds who somehow get money from the Government for any of their programs should also ensure that there are 

yearly audits of things that go on in their own campuses which 

demonstrate to the rest of the world and academia and even people 

like this committee that there is legitimate academic freedom and 

efforts to protect academic freedom on American campuses. 

Thank you very much. 

Mr. SMITH. Mr. Cushman, thank you very much for your excellent testimony and your leadership and you and the other professors who bravely stood up for Dr. Xia, who is our next witness. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Cushman follows:]

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STATEMENT OF XIA YELIANG, PH.D., VISITING FELLOW, CENTER FOR GLOBAL LIBERTY AND PROSPERITY, CATO INSTITUTE 

Mr. XIA. Thank you, to the chairman and the committee. 

I have the serious doubt on how the NYU Shanghai campus can 

possibly avoid the ideological control and the moral education for 

the students—just for U.S. higher institutions. Because in China 

we have four—normally we have five courses. That is compulsory 

courses for undergraduate students, including Marxist theory, Mao 

Zedong thought. And those courses cannot be avoid. 

So I wonder whether the American students—of course, American students, they can choose take this course or not. But the Chinese students, even they are registered by the American universities, they still have the compulsory courses to complete. 

So that means that the Chinese students who get degrees from 

the prestigious universities from U.S., they still have the ideological control and moral education in China. That is one point. 

Nowadays, we find in several cases the Chinese authority order 

to have installed many numerous video cameras for classroom 

teaching all over in China. So that means that the teachers will be 

monitored all the time when they give the courses. So, in some 

cases, the teachers will be talked by either party secretary and 

some political instructors, say, what you talk about the democracy 

and the constitutions it is not proper to talk in classroom and so 

on and so forth. 

Nowadays, Chinese regime send a lot of their teachers and set 

up a lot of their Confucius Institutes overseas. It is a part of the 

strategy of the grand propaganda overseas. According to the official 

report, annual report of the 2013, they have established 440 Confucius Institutes and 646 Confucius classrooms in over 120 countries 

and regions. 

We know the expenditure for each Confucius Institute is about 

half of a million U.S. dollars and, then, that is $60,000 for each 

classroom. So if you just calculated those total figures, you could 

see how much they spent on the export of the soft power, actually 

is the kind of their export of the ideology of Marxism, not socialism. 

And as a recent case that American high school students, whose 

name is called Henry DeGroot from Newton North High School, 

when he got the opportunity to visit China and exchange ideas 

with local students, and he choose his ideas on the democracy and 

freedom. And then, eventually, he was asked to apologize to those 

students. And the American schools and administrators think he 

violated rules. That means, American students, you cannot express 

your own values and ideas in public overseas. That means that you 

cannot break the taboo. But those kind of taboo, it is the Communist taboo. So that means, the Western people, you have to give 

up your values and principles while you are traveling overseas. 

And in many cases, I think that the faculty members and administrators in the most prestigious universities in the U.S. nowadays, 

they have some consideration on whether to have the collaboration 

with China or they persist on their own values. 

I know that some universities, they need some more funding and 

more students come from China. It is a great source for funding. 

But, meanwhile, they are not challenging the Communist values. 

33

They do not mention the three Ts, Tibet, Taiwan, and Tiananmen, 

and Falun Gong, and so on and so forth. 

And, in my own personal experience at Stanford, as a business 

scholar, last year, we arranged a talk, speech, used the classroom 

at Confucius Institute at Stanford. And then we talked about constitutional issues. After that speech, my scheduled speech on the 

Chinese economy and policies was canceled. And people told me because the people from the Confucius Institutes, they think that 

your ideas is too aggressive and radical. It is not good. So they will 

not allow you to give the moral speech in their classroom. But that 

classroom is located on the campus of Stanford. Doesn’t it mean 

that the occupation of their territory or something in American 

campuses. So you don’t have academic freedom, even on campuses 

of universities in U.S. So how can you export the liberal ideas to 

the authoritarian countries if you cannot persist on your own ideas. 

And, also, nowadays, the Chinese regime that became very confident after Xi Jinping became the President, they think that they 

have the free confidence in institutions and theories and, also, in 

goal. They think that the Communist China will do better than the 

capitalist countries. So that they have tried to take all alternatives 

to replace the old values, they think. 

For instance, they will say China’s model is better than the 

Western model, American model. They tried to use the Chinese 

dream to replace the American dream. They use Beijing Consensus 

to replace the Washington Consensus and so on and so forth. Every 

thing, every good thing you can find, they will try to find to establish new alternatives. Like Google, they use Baidu, for eBay, they 

use Alibaba, and for Amazon, they use DangDang. Everything, 

they will find an equivalent or make alternatives to replace. Like 

YouTube, they use Youku, and so on and so forth. 

So, in the future, that means with expansion, not only the economic expansion, but also military expansion. So China tried to be 

another superpower and compete with U.S. in many, many things, 

not only in the economic market activities, but also on values and 

principles of the human beings. There is a lot of materials to provide with figures and the calculations. 

In China, we have so many schools lacking of funding, especially 

in rural areas. I mean, those poorer students that cannot afford to 

pay a lot of stuffs for learning. And they cannot get qualified teachers because of the lacking of funding. But, now, China spends huge 

money to establish Confucius Institutes. 

And so what is the point of that? It is kind of the ideological export. It is not international assistance in finance or in some other 

poverty solutions. I mean, if they really have that money, they 

should spend in China domestically and in rural areas to lot up 

their shabby classroom and schoolhouses to be reconstructed or 

renovated. 

So about the NYU campus in Shanghai. They admit that, on this 

campus, it is hard for you to use Google and others, like YouTube, 

Facebook, and Twitter. So it is advisable that people should have 

their own solution, whether use VPN to be paid or they use some 

other software when they come to China. If they want to get access 

to all the Internet for academic research, they have to suffer all 

those inconveniences in China. 

34

So is that the cost and compromise that the universities has to 

pay? And I have raised that question many times. I said, if there 

are some dictators were trained, they have their own education in 

U.S. institutions, can you call that American university as a success for ones to train people in good values? 

Like Kim Jong-Un, when he back to North Korea, he became another dictator. So when Bo Guagua, the son of the Bo Xilai, he had 

all the highest level of education in Britain and U.S. So when he 

returned, after nothing happened to his dad, it is very possibly for 

him to become another national leader. So that means more and 

more dictators will be trained, even in the U.S. universities. So 

that is a great challenge to our values of education. 

I don’t know whether there is still time. It didn’t show here. So 

I guess, because of the language barrier, I can only say a few. 

Mr. SMITH. Well, Dr. Xia, thank you very much. And I am glad 

your written testimony is excellent and will inform and help us big 

time going forward on what to do and what our response should 

be. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Xia follows:]

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Mr. SMITH. Dr. Richardson. 

STATEMENT OF SOPHIE RICHARDSON, PH.D., CHINA 

DIRECTOR, HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH 

Ms. RICHARDSON. Chairman Smith, Congressman Meadows, it is 

great to see you. Thanks for inviting me to join you. 

We have only just begun research in earnest on this topic in the 

last couple of months. And we consider academic freedom to be a 

critical form of the freedom of expression. And at a time when exchanges between China and the U.S. and others are increasing, 

possibly, at an all-time high—and that is a trend that generally we 

encourage because we think there are enormous benefits in both directions. So we don’t do this research because we want to shut 

these exchanges down. Quite the reverse. We want to make sure 

that they are taking place within a context of and ensuring the 

highest standards of academic freedom. 

So I think what I can do best this afternoon is just give you some 

of our preliminary observations based on the roughly 2 dozen interviews that we have done so far. There are two things that every 

single academic we have talked to has said to us. One is that they 

are all deeply concerned about this problem. 

The other is—and I am not making it up. Literally every single 

person, at some point in the conversation has said to us, ‘‘follow the 

money.’’ And by that, they have meant everything from who is 

funding which programs, what quid pro quos exist, what opportunities may be on offer in the future. I have never heard this phrase 

used so frequently. After somebody said it in the fourth or fifth 

interview, I thought there is definitely a trend here that we all 

need to be following. 

I think, while the degree of concern about lowering academic expression standards is fairly consistent, I think the individual perceptions of vulnerability, either at an institutional or an individual 

level, thus far, seems to vary enormously depending on the prominence, the wealth, and the depth of China programs for the institutions or the individual academic in question. 

Almost everyone worries specifically about access to China, but 

the people who continue to be particularly vulnerable, perhaps 

present—some present company excluded, are young, untenured 

faculty members who must be able to do field work in order to be 

able to complete book projects to bid for tenure. I think this is arguably one of the biggest problems to wrestle with. 

And, certainly, Americans teaching both in China and outside 

China have told us quite explicitly that they have chosen to avoid 

topics such as Tibet or Tiananmen in their classrooms, even when 

they haven’t specifically been asked to do so. Several have also suggested to us, people who have been working on or in China for 

years, that they feel the pressures have gotten more acute in the 

last year. That is a little bit harder to nail down specifically. 

But the kinds of abuses at the moment that, I think, concern us 

the most—and stay tuned since we may learn different things over 

the coming months—is certainly the idea that a far lower standard 

of academic freedom could become the norm or could become accepted—hi, Mr. Wolf—even when it is clearly stipulated by international law and certainly by practice outside of China. And I parVerDate 0ct 09 2002 14:01 Jan 09, 2015 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00044 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 Z:\WORK\_AGH\120414\91663 SHIRL
41

ticularly want to echo Professor Link’s point that there are real 

consequences for knowledge and not just knowledge of a kind that 

is important to the academic community, but that is essential, I 

think, for policy purposes, for economic purposes, for strategic purposes. 

The most pervasive kind of problem we have documented so far 

certainly is about censorship, which seems to come in two different 

forms. There is self-imposed, which, again, is largely about maintaining access. But there is also imposed censorship, people specifically being told or departments deciding not to focus on certain topics. Again, it is early days to give a definitive view about this, but 

some of the sensitivity seems to be worse on issues that have an 

economic or a security dimension to them. 

Arguably most alarming to us is the phenomenon of threats to 

or harassment of students, faculty members, institutions as a 

whole. We were very alarmed, in an interview just a few weeks 

ago, when a very senior, very well regarded scholar who is of ethnic 

Chinese descent said I absolutely change what I say in public because I am worried about the consequences for my family inside 

China. You know, that is not the world we should be living in. 

It is early days to give you recommendations. We usually wait 

until we are a little further down the track. But I can see offering 

up to institutions, in particular, a sort of academic freedom safeguards checklist, a bit akin to what businesses or international financial institutions use to assess risk when they are entering into 

new countries, new partnerships, or new kinds of ventures. 

I think it might also be helpful for universities to have to share 

amongst themselves almost a code of conduct or an action plan 

where they have agreed, in advance, how they will push back 

against certain kinds of threats to academic freedom. Many of 

these different universities are describing to us the same kinds of 

problems. And I think if there was a little bit more of sharing of 

those experiences and a commitment to a particular kind of reaction, that protected a higher standard of academic freedom, we 

might see a lessening of certain kinds of pressure. I think there is 

probably a long conversation to be had about U.S. Government 

funded academic exchanges and making sure that rights are protected therein. Perhaps we can save that for the next hearing. 

Thanks. 

Mr. SMITH. Dr. Richardson, thank you so very much. 

[Ms. Richardson did not submit a prepared statement.] 

Mr. SMITH. And we are joined by Chairman Frank Wolf. Thank 

you, Chairman. 

Just to begin the questioning, and then I will yield to my two distinguished colleagues. Let me just ask you all, you know, New York 

University was the first with a satellite campus partnership in 

Shanghai in 2013, Duke, Kean in New Jersey, University of Pittsburgh, Johns Hopkins, Fort Hays in Kansas, Carnegie Mellon, Missouri State University, and University of Michigan have all opened 

in the last year these satellite, money-rich efforts. And then there 

are 97 Confucius Institutes in the U.S., 429, as far as we can tell, 

worldwide operating in universities, in 115 countries. This is an 

all-out effort by the Chinese Government. 

42

And let me just ask you, if I could, you know, maybe to briefly 

focus on Hanban and their role in all of this. We understand that 

some 10,000 teachers are taught every year, recruited and then 

taught and then deployed. For example, is NYU branding 

authoritarianism and dictatorship? 

We asked the Congressional Research Service to look into this 

and last year—again, I have asked NYU to be here. I said 15. It 

was 16 separate dates that we gave them, beginning on February 

4th of last year and gave them—we said, ‘‘We are available. We 

want to hear. We want real answers to genuine questions.’’ And 

they gave us no response or ‘‘can’t testify,’’ ‘‘scheduling conflicts,’’ 

‘‘overcommitted,’’ and we will continue to try to get them to come 

here. 

But I am especially concerned when the Congressional Research 

Service finds that for Chinese students—this is at their Shanghai 

campus—two-thirds of the $45,000 tuition cost is paid for by the 

Shanghai City Government. That is a huge subsidization, not just 

of the building that is being handed over, but also to the actual 

student tuition. 

It raises questions. Who, then, gets to be the students? Who controls the admission policies? Maybe you can speak to that. I doubt 

if it is the son or daughter of a dissident or of, like, Falun Gong 

practitioner or a Protestant underground church leader or a Catholic Church member who is not a member of the Patriotic Church. 

It raises serious questions about how—the filtering of who, then, 

comes in. 

You, Dr. Xia, gave excellent testimony about the Marxist mandatory political education, five compulsory courses, Mao Zedong, 

Marxism, elementary principles. Maybe you could expand on that 

very briefly. 

A good news story is that a number of universities like Chicago 

and Pennsylvania State have cut ties with the Confucius Institutes. 

So there are some push backs. I would respectfully say it is happening because of your work. Like, you, Dr. Cushman, the faculty 

are speaking up and it is becoming a game changer out there. Is 

that a trend or are these just isolated incidents that are happening? And I have a lot of other questions, but I will just conclude 

with the other ones and yield to my colleagues. 

Last year, the Chinese Communist Party issued the seven noes 

policy to universities and professors, including no discussion of democracy, freedom of the press, civil society, human rights, the Communist Party’s mistakes in the past, the rich and the powerful 

class, an independent judiciary. How does this apply to the satellites? Do they have to follow that? 

And I could just add my own. On the Internet, you mentioned, 

Dr. Xia, some of the problems there. You know, are they getting 

the same censorship? In 2006, I held the beginning of a series of 

hearings on Google. We had Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Cisco 

testify. They were sworn in, and they basically told us they were 

just following Chinese law in the censorship. Now that has been 

handed over to Chinese companies who, I believe, are probably 

even more egregious in their censorship. What happens on these 

campuses? The Shanghai campus of NYU? 

43

Then the last question would be on the enforcement of the egregious, horrific anti-woman policy called the one-child-per-couple 

policy and forced abortion. No unwed mother in China can have a 

baby that can’t get a birth-allowed certificate. It just can’t happen. 

Now, many women who attend college are still single. How does 

the college, how does NYU’s Shanghai campus, or any of these others implement that? 

If you could. 

Mr. LINK. I would like to note the presence of Representative 

Wolf and thank him for coming. He, too, has been stalwart over the 

years in this cause and that is wonderful. There are a number of 

questions here. I will just tic off a few answers and turn to our fellow panelists. 

On the satellite campuses in China, fundamentally, the self-censorship problem, I think, is the same as the pressures that come 

to this side of the ocean. And, in my view, those self-censorship 

problems are still the most far-reaching because they are invisible. 

You can’t see that someone has self-censored. It just happens that 

the Dalai Lama isn’t mentioned and the Tiananmen massacre isn’t 

mentioned and so on. 

On the question of the Hanban and the teachers, the Hanban is 

presented as part of the Ministry of Education. That is false. It is 

from the State Council. It is from the Communist Party. It is a political program. For those of you who don’t know Chinese, Hanban 

is the name of the office that sponsors the Confucius Institutes and 

much of this whole global-reach, soft-power project. 

The point I would like to make about the teachers in the Hanban 

is that they are trained to represent the Communist Party when 

they come abroad and do, so that even in informal contexts when 

they come to Texas or California or wherever it is, they are—they 

feel they need to be ‘‘patriotic,’’ which means pro Communist Party. 

But in their defense, they don’t necessarily themselves feel that 

way. If they are sent abroad and paid by the Hanban in order to 

be missionaries for the Communist Party of China and don’t do it 

correctly, they can be punished when they go back to China. So it 

doesn’t follow from the fact that every Hanban teacher that comes 

over is censoring and self-censoring that that is really what is inside them. I think this point we always have to bear in mind—real 

Chinese people, they are like Dr. Xia—they are real Chinese people, and they have values that aren’t that different from our values. Those universal values, I am sorry, is not a myth. It is a true 

thing. 

On the question of the student subsidies that you raised—the access, who gets to go to Shanghai satellite campuses or other campuses—you are quite right to suspect—this is very complex if you 

go into the statistics of it—but right to suspect that the privileged 

ones get the best access. 

I loved Dr. Xia’s point a moment ago when he pointed out how 

much money the Hanban spends all around the world and neglects 

the poor children in the rural areas in their own country. This 

morning, my friend Renee Xia, who is here today—and I talked 

with Chen Guangcheng, the lawyer, we went to visit him—and that 

was his point. He knew I was coming to this hearing, and he said, 

‘‘You have to make it clear that ordinary people in China suffer, 

44

and they are not part of this. This is part of a Communist Party 

elite who is running this program.’’ And we mustn’t forget that. 

I, of course, can’t go to China, so I haven’t been to the NYU campus. But I will comment that I have a friend who is there—I won’t 

name him because I don’t want to do it without his permission—

an American scholar. And it answers your question, Mr. Chairman, 

about whether those rules about ‘‘you must be Marxist and the 

seven noes and so on’’ apply to American teachers who are there. 

It doesn’t to him. He writes me emails about how much friction he 

goes through trying to defend liberal expression in a context where 

it goes against the grain to do that. 

So I think it is a messy answer to the question there. It is contentious and, of course, should be contentious, so I salute my friend 

there. 

Mr. CUSHMAN. I can’t speak to the role of Hanban, in particular, 

on those kinds of issues. 

I would say that, as many people might know from my written 

testimony and also from the news, I was part of an effort at Wellesley College to speak on behalf of and to help protect Professor Xia 

after he was fired. And we drafted a letter—it was me and six 

other faculty members—that was signed by over 140 faculty members, which I would like to take the occasion publicly in this chamber to thank them for doing that, because they didn’t have to do 

that. And it was a very important thing to have done. And it did 

get attention from other people at other universities, who wrote 

and said that we would like to do similar kinds of things. 

So what I think is that all efforts to combat what I would consider to be the most troubling aspect, when American universities 

or colleges start looking like Chinese universities and colleges in 

terms of what you can speak about, it is an effort of resistance and 

that professors from places that have satellite campuses, professors 

that have partnerships of the kind that I was talking about that 

were forged by MUOs that we don’t really know much about, there 

has to be some collective action at that level in terms of pushing 

back on their own administrations. 

And the problem is with many of these smaller-scale partnerships, which I think are obviously more ubiquitous than the satellite campuses, is that they are very often, in almost all cases, 

forged by the administrations of the universities or colleges and 

then just announced to the faculty. And so the issues of faculty governance and whether faculty actually control these are coming up, 

and that seems to me to be something really important to try to 

effect. 

But I would stress, given that people are following the money, 

given that there is a very distinct political economy of knowledge 

going on here that is all driven by politics and money, especially 

at public institutions, which need more money for programs that 

have been cut, these kind of efforts, these resistant efforts, whether 

it be teaching new kinds of courses or bringing in dissidents, you 

are going against the tide, as it were. 

Mr. SMITH. I don’t know what your time is, and I do hope you 

can save it. We will have to take about a 15-minute recess. There 

are three votes on the floor. The one vote is almost out of time, 

then we have a 5-minute and then another 5-minute. 

45

So we will reconvene, and I hope you can stay. But I do thank 

you for your patience. 

[Recess.] 

Mr. SMITH. The subcommittee will resume its sitting. And, again, 

I apologize for the delay. Dr. Xia, I think you were next up, and 

look forward to your answers. 

Mr. XIA. I would like to mention a few cases in China nowadays. 

Some of the university professors when they talked about constitutions and rule of law and freedom, human rights, and then 

they were removed from their teaching positions, like Zhang 

Xuezhong in Shanghai and Chen Hongguo in Xi’an. They are both 

law professors, and they have been removed. And, eventually, Chen 

Hongguo quit his job. He knows there is no way to continue his 

teaching. 

And also, nowadays, Liu Yunshan, one of the seven top leaders 

who is in charge of the ideological control and propaganda, and he 

gave the instructions that the ‘‘Chinese dream’’ should be infused 

into the teaching and classroom and the brains and minds of students. So it is a demand. It is compulsory. No one will be an exception. 

So, in China, all the arts and literature and all those show business was under control of the propaganda department of CCP, so, 

like, movies, dramas, opera, music, and cartoons even. I know that 

some of the cartoon painters has been arrested only because they 

made some cartoons to criticize the Communist Party. 

So, I mean, the situation is getting much worse than ever before 

just after the 2 years that Xi Jinping became the President. 

And also I found there is, in some of the best universities in U.S., 

there is a kind of phenomenon. I don’t have very direct evidence, 

but I can sense it. I mean, some professors and administrators, 

they visit China and they get special treatments like an honored 

guest, some privilege. Then, in return, they might accept the corrupt officials’ children to be the graduate students in those best 

universities. 

Of course, those students have met the criteria, but still there is 

some room to do something extra. I mean, maybe among 10 excellent students, they will pick up someone that has a direct relationship with the corrupt officials. They know that is much more beneficial than acceptance of the ordinary people. 

So this kind of case, I would say, in the way that the American 

administrators and the professors, they are halfways the dictatorship, in some way, because they make a lot of their compromise 

when dealing with those Chinese authorities, either in universities 

and other institutions. That is my impression. And especially for 

those east Asian studies departments and institutes, they might be 

lacking of their funding support, and they need to have more visits 

and cooperative research with Chinese regime, so they might have 

that kind of a compromise. 

One case is, you know, the RAND Corporation, some senior researchers, they had a very close relationship with the administrator in Central Party School, the vice president. And he visit 

China for 20 times, and each time was arranged by this guy. Anyplace he visited, it would be arranged beforehand. So he got the impression that the Chinese regime became very successful both in 

46

economic performance and in the whole life. So I think that that 

senior researcher got it wrong, because he just believe in that kind 

of thing through this official arrangement. 

So that is my suspects on the effectiveness of a cooperation and 

academic research between U.S. and China. Thank you. 

Mr. SMITH. Thank you, Dr. Xia. 

Dr. Richardson. 

Ms. RICHARDSON. I will just add a couple of very quick points. 

To the issue of which rules will really prevail on satellite campuses, I think most Western universities will say—and in other instances, for example, in the Middle East or with respect to Yale’s 

campus in Singapore, for example, university officials have said, 

the same rules will prevail as prevail on home campuses. And I 

think in principle that is lovely to imagine will be the case. I think 

much depends on how that actually gets tested and how the universities behave when, for example, you know, somebody on a 

Western university’s campus inside China wants to have a symposium about Tibet or Xinjiang or one of the issues we can reasonably 

expect will be controversial. 

And, you know, one assumes that that is some of universities’ 

worst nightmares, but they can’t possibly imagine that is not going 

to happen, right? And whether they are actually really prepared to 

deal with that in a breach is not clear to us yet. 

On the issue of positive consequences that this debate has generated, I actually think that, especially the discussion about Confucius Institutes and their presence in universities and secondary 

schools in the U.S. actually has the potential to be a very helpful 

catalyst about a broader discussion about human rights abuses in 

China and Chinese Government standards, I think in the same 

way that, for example, you know, tainted products coming from 

China mobilizes public opinion here in a way that discussions, for 

better or for worse, about individual cases, for example, or problematic Chinese Government policies doesn’t. 

You know, I do think that if one of the net results of these debates is that there is more money, particularly for language programs and for research in a variety of fields, that is a positive outcome, as is the presence of lots of academics and students from 

China in the U.S. I think that is a very positive consequence. 

Mr. SMITH. Thank you. 

You know, I have been in Congress 34 years, and I remember in 

my second term a terrible human rights abuse became known 

through the work of a guy named Steven Mosher, and that is the 

one-child, forced-abortion policy. And he was taken very credibly, 

as he should have been. ‘‘60 Minutes’’ and ‘‘Frontline’’ did a tremendous expose largely built on his work. The Washington Post 

carried a three-part incisive article by Michael Weisskopf, who was 

the Beijing bureau chief, and I know Mosher, was one of his 

sources. He had many, but he was one. And yet Stanford denied 

him his attempt to become a doctor. 

And the Wall Street Journal, if I remember correctly, did a piece 

called ‘‘Stanford Morality’’ and called on Stanford to revisit their 

concern about access to China when a human rights abuse has 

been reported. 

47

So it is a longstanding problem—the reason for mentioning 

this—but it seems it has gotten exponentially worse in the last 10 

years, with the Confucius Institutes and now with more and more 

of our universities setting up satellite campuses in China. 

Is it all about money? I mean, it is hard to understand. You 

know, we all want to get closer to the Chinese people, but when 

this is all about a dictatorship that is adversarial in the extreme 

toward its own people, woe to us if we are enabling that dictatorship through this means. 

I thought your statement, Dr. Cushman, about how the last to 

know are the professors, that the administrators are the ones who 

bring this about—and I know many college presidents, they are always in the hunt for money. It is a very, very difficult job that they 

have, and they do need to find sources, but not all sources are licit 

or ethical. 

So maybe you could speak to that a bit. And maybe drill down 

a little bit more about what Hanban is. You know, for most people, 

that is a word they have never heard before. 

One of the things we do in this subcommittee is that it is all 

about follow-up and action plans that come out of our hearings. As 

I mentioned, we are already looking at a GAO study so your recommendations on what we ought to ask the GAO to look for, if you 

could get it officially for the record or just get it to us, we would 

deeply appreciate that so we get it right on what we are asking. 

You are the experts. 

And, Dr. Xia, if you could just tell us a little bit what it was like 

going through your travail. Again, thank you, Dr. Cushman, for 

rallying to his defense so effectively, and your fellow professors. 

But what was that like? 

And then maybe get to those other issues, as well, if you would. 

Mr. XIA. While I was teaching in Peking University, for more 

than 13 years, only in recent 2 years, 3 years, I found some students, they actually reported what I have said in the classroom to 

the authorities. They think there are some offensive words that go 

against the party and the socialism. So the authority would think 

that that would not be accepted since you are teaching university. 

All universities in China are all state-owned. It is not private. 

Even the private universities, actually, they don’t have the qualified teachers or sufficient resources to provide qualified education. 

So in Peking University and Tsinghua and all those universities, 

you have to obey the CCP’s rules. 

So people, nowadays, call all the universities in China as the 

party schools. They are all party schools. So they should be obey 

the doctrines. Actually, there is no academic freedom. If you say 

capitalism is might be a good institution, at least in the sense of 

the research, and people say, no, politically you are not right, so 

you cannot do that research. 

So I know the funding for all humanities and social sciences in 

China, it all comes from one organization. This organization called 

the National Planning Committee for Humanities and Social 

Sciences. It is under the direct leadership of the propaganda department of the CCP. Actually, the office is located in the department of propaganda of the CCP. So that means they are ideologiVerDate 0ct 09 2002 14:01 Jan 09, 2015 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00051 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 Z:\WORK\_AGH\120414\91663 SHIRL
48

cally controlled by CCP. There is no freedom at all to have the academic research. 

And so when they have the cooperation with Western scholars, 

there are also some requirements that says any research that violates the socialist rules and cannot be accepted and cannot be published in China. So they have some warnings to American professors, better not to touch this kind of issue, like Tibet and so on and 

so forth. Otherwise, this kind of research cannot get funding. 

That is the basic situation. 

Mr. SMITH. Thank you. 

Mr. XIA. Thank you. 

Mr. SMITH. If nobody else wants to respond, just a couple of other 

final questions and anything else you would like to say as we conclude. 

At that 2006 hearing that I had with Google, Microsoft, Cisco, 

and Yahoo, we actually put up on a large board the Google search 

engine for China. And we typed in a whole lot of things, from 

‘‘Tibet’’ to the ‘‘Dalai Lama,’’ especially ‘‘Tiananmen Square.’’ We 

got beautiful pictures of Tiananmen Square and happy people, but 

no tanks, no soldiers, no bleeding students. And then when you did 

Google, the search engine that was available here in the United 

States, it was millions of hits of what truly happened during those 

momentous times when so many people sacrificed for democracy 

and freedom. 

What happens on the campuses, like on Tiananmen? What would 

NYU-Shanghai or any of these in China, these satellites, if somebody says, what happened in Tiananmen Square, what does a professor do? If he is videotaped, is he self-censoring so he is not 

pulled off and taken by the secret police? I mean, what happens on 

a day-to-day basis? Because students will always have inquiring 

minds. At least I hope they will. 

What happens? 

Mr. LINK. Students, yes, have inquiring minds. And people in 

China who want to jump over the great firewall and get access can 

usually do that by using VPNs. It takes work, and you have to play 

cat-and-mouse with the censors. The problem is that most people 

are either afraid to do that or don’t have the time to do that or just 

don’t think of doing that, so we have, as you correctly point out, 

this huge inequality of what is available inside China and what is 

available outside. 

I would like to expand a little bit, based on a conversation we 

had during the break, about this access inequality problem. Chinese students and scholars, including representatives of the Communist Party of China, come to our free society and look at our 

Googles and our libraries and our free expression and have full access to that, whereas Americans who go to China, along with all 

the Chinese people, have to jump over these firewalls and figure 

out how to get what they ought to have had without that struggle. 

I want to put this in the context of the problem of censoring 

books. It has become a controversy in my field of China studies recently whether you should accept censorship of your book about 

China in order to get it translated and published inside China. 

Some people say, yes, I will accept the censorship because the larger good is that the rest of the book itself gets through to Chinese 

49

readers. And some people say, no, censorship is wrong, and even 

if it means my book won’t get over to the Chinese readers, I am, 

on principle, not going to do it. 

I respect people on both sides of that divide. It is a tough dilemma. But the point is that, at bottom, that is also an access problem. If you think about it, what the Chinese Communist Party is 

saying to the American scholars is, yes, you can have access to our 

people to read your book, but the price you pay is that you have 

to censor what we don’t like. So it is fundamentally an access problem. 

And I just wonder—I am not a politician—but I wonder if our 

Government couldn’t do something to say that access has to be fair 

on both sides. If you can have full access to our society, our scholars, our Voice of America, our Radio Free Asia, and so on, we have 

to have full access to yours. They won’t like that, of course, but 

that is in principle a good argument to have to make. 

The final comment I would like to make is about our chairman’s 

observation that in his 34 years of service things have gotten demonstrably worse. I think that is a direct quote, but something like 

that. You are right; it is demonstrably worse. And in the last 2 

years, it is seriously demonstrably worse. 

I worry that our society has what I would call a ‘‘warning fatigue’’ about China, because people like Sophie Richardson and 

Chairman Smith and me and so on have been harping on human 

rights for 2 decades, and the society might nod their heads, ‘‘Yeah, 

yeah, it is them again, they are doing their thing again,’’ and we 

are doing our thing again. But somehow we have to get the point 

across that in these last 2 years it is worse—seriously worse, 

threateningly worse. 

And I will stop there. Thanks. 

Mr. CUSHMAN. I would just reiterate the asymmetry problem, the 

problem in the soft power strategy of China has an open society to 

work in and we have a closed society to work in. And, you know, 

the more general problem of open societies is that they have to 

allow criticisms of themselves, whereas closed societies don’t have 

to allow any of that and they don’t. 

I did want to say something about the issue of revenue and 

money, because you are absolutely right. Any college president or 

provost or someone in charge has to worry about money and 

sources of money. But my argument has only ever been that, yes, 

that would be your job. If I were a college president, I would want 

to maximize the return to my university or my college. But you 

have to do both. You have to also protect the free space from infringements, subtle and not so subtle. 

The subtle ones are more a concern to me, these small acts of 

self-censorship that continually add up into something much greater. And I am concerned, in terms of ‘‘demonstrably worse,’’ what I 

am concerned about is if our institutions in the United States become more similar to their counterparts in China with regard to 

what we can talk about not just in China but about a whole range 

of issues. 

I would point out that a colleague of mine, who has actually testified in a hearing before on other issues, particularly related to 

Tiananmen, who has just published a book on Tiananmen, has had 

50

to suffer extreme abuse mostly from, kind of, cyber bullying attacks 

from all over the place about her views and, you know, personal 

abuse and ad hominem attacks by orchestrated, kind of, campaigns 

to criticize her for writing an honest and truthful book about 

Tiananmen, in which her whole life has been involved in doing. 

And this is to be expected in these kinds of cyber attacks that 

have no origin and you don’t know where they are coming from, 

and they appear to be Chinese people that are attacking her for 

being anti-China or agents of America or whatever. But lately what 

has concerned me is when people present critical or provocative 

perspectives on China and are actually attacked by their colleagues, who are not necessarily of Chinese origin or have Chinese 

interests, for being too negative about China or not stressing the 

positive aspects of China. 

And when American or, in this case—this talk that I am referring to took place in Europe—when a European professor, you 

know, really launches an assault on a professor who is telling the 

truth about China, that starts to worry me. That is only one case, 

obviously, but I believe that what I am worried about is that that 

might get worse, that people like us, dissidents or people like Professor Link who speak out, or Dr. Richardson, will be objects of attack for stressing the negative aspects of China and in some ways 

kind of raining on the parade, as it were, raining on the soft power 

parade, if I might be indulged with that one. 

Ms. RICHARDSON. I think the only point I will add to this at the 

moment—it seems appropriate when we are talking about academic freedom in China. For anybody who is harboring any illusions about how much space there is on Chinese campuses, I think 

we would do well to remember not only Ilham Tohti, who has been 

given a life sentence for essentially trying to have a vigorous, critical conversation in his classrooms about inter-ethnic dialogue, but 

whose students are being prosecuted, as well. And it is not clear 

what the outcome for them will be. 

But I think that is a pretty sobering reminder of what you can 

and can’t say in a classroom in the mainland. 

Mr. SMITH. Dr. Richardson, has the Obama administration 

shown an interest in pushing back? 

You and I have talked many times. I mean, we had a hearing, 

I will say to our other distinguished colleagues, friends, witnesses, 

where we had five daughters, all of whose dads were being held, 

including the daughter of Gao Zhisheng. And when we tried to get 

a meeting with President Obama with the five daughters, we were 

told he didn’t have the time. He might not agree with the strategy 

on how do you promote human rights, but not to meet with five 

daughters that want to say, ‘‘Please intervene on behalf of our dads 

who are being tortured.’’

I raise this because there has been a tone-deafness on so many 

of these issues, and I wondering if we are running into the same 

thing here, that somehow some good will come out of this, when 

I think it is a gross enabling of bad behaviors and dictatorship. 

And as I think several of you have said—you have said it, Dr. 

Link—you know, Xi Jinping in the last 2 years is truly projecting 

power. 

51

I have had hearings here—because I host part of this subcommittee, the first name of it is ‘‘Africa, Global Health, Global 

Human Rights’’—on the undue influence, the pernicious influence 

that China is having on African governments—the bad governance 

model. And they are very close, obviously, to people like Bashir and 

Mugabe and others. And yet they are starting these institutes in 

Africa, as well. 

Are they concerned about it? 

Ms. RICHARDSON. What is the best way to answer this question? 

The President——

Mr. SMITH. As always, truthfully. As you do. As you do. 

Ms. RICHARDSON. I am just trying to find out how blunt to be. 

The President did speak publicly at a somewhat abstract level. 

There were some specifics about Hong Kong, for example, when he 

was in Beijing. It is our understanding that a more specific discussion was had behind closed doors. 

I think the administration is to be commended for the real surround-sound response when Professor Tohti’s sentence was announced. There was a White House statement, there was a State 

Department statement, the President spoke, Secretary Kerry 

spoke. 

But we were very disappointed that not only did the President 

not follow through on the recommendation that we and eight other 

organizations made to call publicly for the release of five specific 

people, including Liu Xiaobo and Liu Xia, but also the President 

gave an interview to Xinhua, and there is some language in that 

interview, particularly about ETIM and about terrorism issues, 

that we find extremely problematic. Because the way it is formulated, I think, very much plays into a Chinese Government narrative about terrorism and about Xinjiang. 

And, you know, I don’t mean to suggest that there aren’t people 

committing unconscionable acts of violence in Xinjiang. That is 

clearly happening. I think it is absolutely incumbent on the administration to make a very clear difference between what it knows 

about specific groups of people who are committing or who are contemplating committing acts of terrorism and the population as a 

whole. 

You know, the latter part of the equation about the relationship 

between human rights denials and violence or terrorism did get 

made but, again, in a very abstracted fashion that in no way called 

the Chinese Government onto the carpet for its abuses in Xinjiang. 

And I think that is extremely problematic, especially given the priority that the Chinese Government is now placing on terrorism and 

counterterrorism cooperation with other governments. 

So that is a long answer. But, you know, the administration has 

occasionally been vocal at senior-most levels on specific cases. It 

has been much less frequent——

Mr. SMITH. Have they shown a concern about the Confucius Institutes and the satellites as to what this really is all about? 

Ms. RICHARDSON. You know, I am going to come back to you on 

that because I haven’t looked nearly as clearly as I should have on 

U.S. Government responses to these issues. I certainly know it is 

of concern to people. 

52

And I do want to note that there are many people at the working 

level in the State Department who are pretty ferocious defenders 

of human rights——

Mr. SMITH. Right. 

Ms. RICHARDSON [continuing]. And who——

Mr. SMITH. Well, you know, Dr. Perry made an excellent recommendation about the visas, withholding visas. 

In the year 2000, I got a bill passed, the Admiral James W. 

Nance and Meg Donovan Foreign Relations Authorization Act. One 

of those provisions has a visa ban for anybody who is complicit in 

coercive population control and these abuses against women. Less 

than 30 people have been singled out, and there has been no effort. 

We get no good answers as to why. 

I am all for visas and, matter of fact, correspondingly, or similarly, I wrote the law called the Belarus Democracy Act. Because 

it is a lot easier for us to criticize Belarus, Lukashenka, there are 

200 people on that list, or more, and less than 30 that have been 

so sanctioned in China. 

I think your idea is excellent, Dr. Link, so we will pursue that. 

All your ideas are great, and we will, you know, merge them in 

and merge/purge and go forward with them. So thank you. 

Anybody else want to add anything before we close? 

You have been great with your time, even greater with your expertise and insights and your leadership. 

You know, in Proverbs 22:1, it says, ‘‘A good name is more desirable than great riches.’’ I would hope that our universities and colleges who enjoy tremendous names and earned prestige would look 

at what they are doing in terms of enabling dictatorship, look at 

the terms and conditions as never before, and, like the University 

of Chicago and perhaps some others, will sever a relationship that 

not only enables bad behaviors but also preserves their brand and 

their good name. 

And we will reinvite, as we have done 16 times, NYU to be at 

this witness table. And this is the first of what will be about a halfdozen hearings going into next year. So you have kicked off I think 

a very important set of scrutiny and focus probe. Thank you so 

very, very much. 

Mr. XIA. Can I just say 1 minute? 

Mr. SMITH. Dr. Xia? 

Mr. XIA. I notice one phenomenon is that every year hundreds 

of English books, including some textbooks, have been translated 

into Chinese and published in China. But, among them, majority 

of the books has been deleted a lot. For any contents the authority 

might not like, there are deletes. 

So this kind of thing is a violation of the academic freedom. And 

also it is kind of cheating and frauding, because the Chinese readers, they don’t know which part has been deleted. 

Giving one example, it is a very famous book. It is called ‘‘The 

History of Modern China.’’ It is written by Xuejun Yeu, a scholar, 

American professor, basically come from China, but he lived in U.S. 

for many years, and now he died. This book has been deleted onethird of the parts of the contents. And the whole version published 

in Hong Kong, but in China the version is only two-thirds left. So 

something like that. 

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I mean, I would like to have the U.S. institutions of higher education to have this in mind. Any publications that will be translated in China, they must pay much more attention on that, whether it is important the contents would be deleted or not. 

Thank you. 

Mr. SMITH. Thank you, Dr. Xia. 

The hearing is now adjourned. 

[Whereupon, at 3:09 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.] 

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A P P E N D I X 

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MATERIAL SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD BY THE HONORABLE CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, 

A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF NEW JERSEY, AND CHAIRMAN, 

SUBCOMMITTEE ON AFRICA, GLOBAL HEALTH, GLOBAL HUMAN RIGHTS, AND INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS


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